Territori istituzionali, spazi sociali: note in margine a una geografia politica delle circoscrizioni amministrative

Within the borders of the national States the effective exercise of power is modulated through a plurality of territorial divisions that represent, at the same time, the architecture of the institutional system and the intermediate bodies of the centre/ periphery relations. These relationships gave rise to multiple centres of political government that are grafted into the game of scales, with variable geometries, of local territories, no longer classifiable in a binary opposition, affirmed between the age of Enlightenment and the first half of the Twentieth century. The analysis of this interwoven aspects (social, institutional, territorial) in which citizenship horizons coagulate, the political geography of institutional spaces for the government of the territory can unleash all its heuristic potential, revealing profiles partly unexplored for the extent of their social grip. The essay aims to underline the preeminent political nature of territorial orders, of the processes that govern the construction of the institutional mosaic and the design of the different boundaries. It critically reconstructs the state of the art of the themes – placed at the confluence of various knowledge – put to work in the research dedicated to the relationships between spatiality/statehood/administrative boundaries/ citizenship, starting from the studies of political-administrative geography. It then identifies the main methodological acquisitions and the stimuli coming from the advances produced in different disciplinary fronts. Among the many solicitations emerges the shared opinion on the opportunity of a critical genealogy of the thought patterns of modernity, relativizing many of the categories on which we have built the idea of the modern territorial State and the forms with which it has been represented over time.